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so my pleasure to introduce our esteemed guest to the stage David Brooks is regarded as one of the nation's leading writers and commentators an oped columnist with the New York Times he is
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a regular guest commentator on PBS newsour nprs All Things Considered and NBC's Meet the Press his new book how to know a person the art of seeing others
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and being deeply seen is the latest in a collection of five best-selling books including bobos in Paradise on Paradise Drive The Social Animal the road to
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character and the second Mountain how to know a person is an honest and personal guide to fostering meaningful Connections in every aspect of our lives
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and for our Philadelphia audience I have to let you know if you don't already know that Mr Mr Brooks grew up on the main line he went to Radner high school he's a he's a local boy local talent and
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we're really happy to have him back in town tonight so please join me in welcoming David Brook thank you I'm not tall enough for this Podium is Kobe Bryant used to speak here
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is that what's going on here uh it's a pleasure to be back here and um to be back in Philadelphia my somewhat Hometown you're going to shorten if you could give me taller heels on my boots that might
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work um so I'm I'm going to try to offer you um we'll talk a little politics at the end but mostly I'm going to try to offer you array of uplift in the dark and uh confusing and hard time uh so I'm
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F first going to start start talking about the subject I know best which is myself um and so uh some of you may remember that movie Fiddler on the Roof uh and you know from that movie how warm
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and Huggy Jewish families can be they're always singing and dancing and frolicking around uh I came from the other kind of Jewish Family and so the phrase in our home was think yish act
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British uh and so we were sort of unemotional stiff upper lip types and then uh in Nursery School when I was four my the teacher apparently told my parents David doesn't play with
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the other kids he just observes this which I guess is good for a career in journalism I always say that if I tell journalism students if you're at a football game and everybody else is doing the wave and you just sit there and don't do the wave you have the right
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kind of aloof personality style to become a journalist because we just watch things and then uh when I was 17 at Radner uh I wanted to date uh oh when I was seven I uh read a book called
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padding in the bear and decided that moment I wanted to become a writer and I've pretty much been writing every day since uh my Fitbit used to tell me when I write between 7 and noon and my Fitbit
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used to tell me I was snapping but I was doing what God put me on this Earth to do so I my heart rate apparently went down and then when I was 17 at Radner I wanted to date this woman named Bice and she didn't want to date
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me she wanted to date some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy and so those were my values um and then when I was 18 uh the
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admission missions officers at Columbia Wesley and brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago uh and so that was an extremely cerebral place the famous saying about Chicago
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it's where fun goes to die uh my favorite saying about Chicago it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St Thomas aquinus um so we were very much up in
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our head and I fit right in I had a double major at Chicago in history and cibus um and we actually freshman year we uh took my roommate who had never boxed a day in his life and entered him to the
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Golden Gloves competition and we gave him a nickname the kosher killer uh and then we uh we practiced the Chicago way which is we didn't practice boxing we read a lot of books about boxing uh and
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his illustrious career lasted 29 seconds um and so I was pretty intellectual uh and then I into journalism which is a little bit of a detached profession where you're you're uh observing people and judging them I
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was hired as a conservative columnist at the New York Times a job I likened to being the chief Rabbi at Mecca uh not a lot of company there uh and then I got a job in TV H
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but I got a job in the most cerebral form of TV which is the PBS NewsHour where we have for TV extremely long 14-minute conversations about things uh and I love our audience uh it's a
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somewhat seasoned audience and so if a 93y old lady comes up to me at the airport I know what she's going to say I don't watch your program but my mother loves it
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so um and so all this is to say I was up in my head a lot and there's a moment from about 10 years ago that symbolizes for me that way of living so I love baseball
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I've gone to hundreds maybe thousands of baseball games I've never caught a ball and so but I'm in Camden Yards in Baltimore with my youngest son and a batter loses control of the bat it flips
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up in the air and it lands on my lap and so getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball and so a normal human being stands up holds his trophy in the air jumps up
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and down high fives everybody hugs gets on the Jumbotron I take the bat put it on the ground and just sit staring straight ahead with no em emotion on my face and so I look back on that uh and I
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think show a little Joy man show a little Joy but that wasn't who I was but I do if I'm not a exceptional person but I am a grower I try to
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grow uh and so you know parenting was sort of an emotional Revolution I had some public failures and humiliations uh and I learned about Emotion by I wrote a book called The Social Animal uh to learn about emotion
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which is a book about emotion classic University of Chicago trick to try to learn about Emotion by writing a book about emotion and I think I open up my heart and the sad thing was as I opened my
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heart I became more open to music and dance uh and the Arts and I discovered unfortunately my heart is 14 years old perpetually I like whatever songs 14-year-olds are listening to at any
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given moment and so caty Perry I Kissed a Girl avra LaVine complicated every song in the Taylor Swift song book I don't even remember high school I have listened to so many songs at high school
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breakups it's as if I was reincarnated and I came back as Britney Spears um and so I did get a little more emotion I can prove it to you though I have to name drop so I've been interviewed twice in my life by
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Oprah in 2014 and in 2019 and after the second interview she says to me uh I've rarely seen somebody change so much you were so emotionally blocked before and that was like a good moment for me and
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she should know she's Oprah right um and the weird thing is and the sad thing for our country is that I was as I was making a journey toward becoming more fully human the country was making a journey
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to becoming less human and more dehumanized and there are all sorts of Statistics I won't recite them all but we all know the suicide is up by 30% depression rates are skyrocketing 36% of
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Americans report feeling lonely frequently 45% of teenagers say they feel despondent and hopeless most of the time the number of people who have no who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four
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times 36% more Americans are not in a romantic relationship uh the number of people Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category has gone up by 50% and so what I see in my career is an
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epidemic of blindness of people not feeling seen valued and heard and when you feel yourself not seen you regard that as an insult which it is and an injustice which it is and so you lash
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out and so a society that becomes more sad eventually becomes more mean and so I was at a a a restaurant in New York and the owner told me he has to kick people out of the restaurant uh
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every week now for rude Behavior never used to happen uh my sister-in-law is a nurse a head nurse at a hospital in Camden and apparently her main challenge is keeping nurses because the patients have become so abusive the nurses want
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to leave their profession and so that's just sadness and meanness uh and so why is all this happening well I could tell a bunch of stories one of them would be the
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technology story social media is driving us crazy one would be a sociology story we're not as involved in Civic Life as we used to be wouldn't be an economic story there's more in income inequality than there used to be and so we leave
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desperate lives but the story I emphasize is the most direct which is we become sadder and meaner because we don't treat each other with the consideration that we deserve and treating each other with
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consideration and Reserve we deserve is partly a matter of just being openhearted toward each other but it's crucially a matter of skills to be a good friend to be a good parent to be a good teacher to be a good colleague
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requires certain social skills how do you be a good listener how do you reveal vulnerability an appropriate Place how do you offer criticism in a way that's caring how do you disagree well how do
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you sit with someone who's suffering and so in my view we don't teach these skills anymore if we ever did and so people are go a wash in Social ignorance and so my book is
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simply an attempt to walk us through the skills it takes to be to know another human being and make them feel known seen and heard and so I would ask you how how good are you at these skills
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well I haven't met most of you but I can tell you with great confidence you're not as good as you think you are there's a guy at the University of Texas who studies this and the average person when they meet a stranger and start a conversation with him they accurately
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understand what's going on in that person's head 20% of the time with friends and family it goes up to 35% of the time some people are pretty good they're 55% of the time and some people are zero% of the time but think they're
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100% of the time we're often strangers to each other in any group of people there are people who are diminishers and they're illuminators the diminishers are not curious about other people they
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stereotype they ignore they don't ask questions I sometimes leave a party and I think no that whole time nobody asked me a question and I've come to recognize my assum my conclusion is that only about 30% of the people you meet are
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question askers they persistently are curious about you the other 70% are perfectly nice people they're just not questioners and those are diminishers illuminators on the other hand are
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people who are curious about you and make you feel special and lit up and so there was a novelist who wrote about 100 years ago named I Foster and his biographer said of him to speak to him was to be seduced by an inverse
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Charisma a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest sharpest and best self who wouldn't want to be able to bring out that's that in other people there's a probably apocryphal story told about
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Jenny Jerome who would later be go on to become Winston Churchill's mom and in the late 19th century when she was a young woman one night she was seated next to a dinner in London with William
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Gladstone the Prime Minister of England and she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England then a couple weeks later she seated at a dinner next to Gladstone's great political rival Benjamin Disraeli
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and she left dinner with Disraeli thinking that she was the cleverest person in England and so it's good to be Gladstone it's better to be Israeli many of you probably know the vaed research facility Bell labs they
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had a bunch of researchers and some of them were just more creative and Innovative than others and they wanted to know why and so they checked out their IQs they checked out their educational backgrounds they couldn't figure it out it turned out the most
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creative researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch every day with a guy named Harry nywest who's electrical engineer and he got inside their problems he got inside their head he asked them the good good questions
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and he walked with them as they solved their problems and so Harry nist is an Illuminator and so how do you get better at being an Illuminator well the first thing whether you're young or more
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seasoned is you read study the humanities you study literature plays the Arts the humanities are the most I tell young people the humanities are the most practical thing you can major in because they teach you about other
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people and if you can't understand other people you'll be miserable and you'll make people around you miserable then there's a series of steps one should walk through to really get to
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know somebody well and make them feel respected and that series of steps begins with the first gaze you're just encountering somebody and you're looking at them when
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we meet somebody there's a series of unconscious questions going through our minds am I am I a priority to you am I a person to you will you respect me and the answers to those questions are communicated in the eyes before any
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words come out of your mouth I was in Waco Texas several years ago and I was having lunch with a woman named laru dorsy and Mrs dorsy was a teacher most of her career and she presented herself to me as this Stern disciplinarian sort
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of a drill sergeant type and she told me I loved my students enough to discipline them and so we're sitting there and I'm a little intimidated by her she was tough tough lady and in the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy
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derell who's a pastor he pastors the homeless uh and he goes up to her and he grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93y old and he says Mrs dorsy Mrs dorsy
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you're the best you're the best I love you I love you and that Stern disciplinarian that I had been talking to turns into a bright ey shining 9-year-old girl and so the moral of the story is
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greet people more like Jimmy and less like me and that's partly because he's a warm big personality but partly the profound thing is this Jimmy's a pastor as I mentioned and so when Jimmy greets
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anybody he's greeting someone anybody made in the image of God he's looking into the face of God he's looking at somebody with the in a soul of infinite value and dignity he's looking at somebody so important that
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Jesus was willing to die for that person now you could be Christian Jewish Muslim Muslim Buddhist atheist agnostic I don't care but greeting each person you meet with that level of reverence and respect
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is a precondition for seeing them well it says know that each person you meet is not a problem to be solved they're a mystery that you will never get to the bottom of so it's that first gaze is so powerful attention is a moral act the
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kind of attention we cast on the world determines the kind of person we are in the world so that's the Gaze the second phase of getting to know someone is what I I call accompaniment most of life is
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not having deep conversations with other people it's just hanging out it's picking up your kids at school or attending a meeting accompaniment is an other centered way of being a normal course of life we think of The Pianist
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who accompanies a singer The Pianist is there paying attention to the singer he's there to Make Her Shine and so we want to have that other centered way of being and sometimes it can be just as casual as hanging out I have friends who
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say we like our friends to be linger when they come for dinner we just want to linger with them they're fun that's a great quality of accompaniment the second is play when you're playing with someone
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you don't have to have deep conversations whether it's pickle ball or Uno or basketball whatever you're just but when you're at play you're you're yourself you're more natural I have friends who I played basketball with and you can imagine how good I am
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uh and we've never really had deep conversations but we've had trash talk and high fives and we passed the the ball and we really sort of know each other you can see how powerful it was when my kid my oldest son was about 14
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or 12 months I can't remember um he woke up he woke up at 4 in the morning every morning and I played with him till 10:00 a.m. when I left uh and I remember thinking one day you know I know him better than I've ever known
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anybody and he's known me better than anybody's known me because I was so emotionally open and play and no words had crossed between us cuz he couldn't yet talk and yet there was a a deep bond
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between us sometimes accompanyment is just being present it's just showing up at the right time so I had a student uh a couple years ago two years ago named
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Jillian Sawyer and Jillian's uh dad died of pancreatic cancer uh while she was in college and as he was dying they talked about the fact that he would probably miss some of the big events of her life like her
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wedding and after college she was a bridesmaid at a friend's wedding and she went through the wedding she watched the father give a toast to his daughter a beautiful toast the Father of the Bride and then it came time for the father
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daughter dance and she just didn't want to sit through that so she left the table and went to the restroom quietly just to have a cry and when she came out of the restroom all the people at her table in
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the adjacent table had gotten up and had were just standing by the door of the restroom and she wrote this in a paper uh that she gave me permission to quote from what I will remember forever is that no one said a word each person
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including newer boyfriends who I knew less well gave me a reaffirming hug and headed back to their table no one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief they were there for me just for
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a moment and it was exactly what I needed that's a beautiful example of just the art of presence just showing up for somebody so that's the second phase the third phase is
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conversation you have to be really good conversationalist to get to know other people and to have the kind of encounters you want to have and so how good are you at conversation well again I don't know you that well but you're
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probably not as good as you think you are it's easy to have bad conversations that's two people making statements at each other that's a bad conversation a good conversation goes somewhere people say something and the
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other person says yeah that's good let me build on that and then build on that build on that and we start at one place we ended up over here I asked a bunch of conversation experts what are some tips to become a better
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conversationalist and they gave me a bunch a few of which I'll repeat here one treat attention as an onoff switch not a dimmer it should be 100% attention or 0% but not
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60% two be a loud listener I have a buddy named Andy Crouch who lives in swathmore and when you're talking to him it's like talking to a Pentecostal Church he's like Amen uhhuh brother brother preach
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that and I I just love talking to that guy make them authors not Witnesses when people tell you a story they don't go into enough detail and so if you say well where was your boss sitting when she said that to you suddenly they're
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narrating you a story you want to get people in a story mode even in journalism I no longer ask people what do you believe about this I ask them how did you come to believe that about this that's they start telling me a story
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about some experience they had or some person who shaped their values a much better conversation Don't Fear the pause if we're in conversation and I make a comment that starts at my shoulder and
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goes to my fingertips at what point have you stopped listening so you can start thinking what you're going to say in response probably here so let me talk to my fingertips and then pause and then you can have a thoughtful
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response don't be a Topper topping is when you say something about how you're having problems with your teenage son and I say I know exactly you're going through I'm having problems with my Tommy it sounds like
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I'm trying to relate but what I'm really doing is say I don't really care about your problems let me talk about my own and so don't be a Topper two final ones keep the gem statement in the center when we have an argument there's usually
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something deep down we agree upon if my brother and I are arguing about our Dad's health care we both want what's best for our dad and so if we could keep that point of agreement the gem statement in the center you save a
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relationship in the midst of an argument and then the final one is find the disagreement under the disagreement when we disagree about something like tax policy there's probably some philosophical reason we see it
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differently so let's explore what that is it's a more fun way to have a conversation finally the quality of your conversation depends on the quality of the questions you ask and so we should
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get really good at asking great questions now kids are phenomenal at asking questions I have a friend named naobi wayi who teaches seventh grade boys in New York how to be interviewers how to ask questions her first day in
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class she said okay you guys can ask me anything and I'll answer honestly first question from a seventh grade boy are you married no second question are you divorced yes third question do you still
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love him her eyes widen she says yes fourth question does he know do your kids know by now she's
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crying so kids are great questioners and as adults we get a little shy about it too shy in my view and so we want to get good at asking questions and sometimes you're just getting to know someone you're not going
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to ask some deep profound question I ask people sometimes like I always ask people where you're from or where'd you get your name or tell me some your favorite unimportant thing about yourself I learned from that question an academic I rever watches a lot of trash
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TV but that's his favorite unimportant thing about him but you want the questions to be open-ended storytelling questions so I read in a book called you're not listening by ke Murphy about a focus group moderator who was hired by
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grocery stores to find out why people are coming into the grocery stores late at night and she could have just said tell me why do you go to grocery stores late at night to the focus group instead she said tell me about the last time you
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went to a grocery store after 11: p.m. and one lady who' been quiet through the whole focus group said well I had smoked a joint and I I wanted a Minaj ATA with me Ben and
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Jerry and so you got a little glimpse into her life um once you get to know somebody my favorite questions are ones that take
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them out of their daily experience and get them 30,000 feet looking at their life and so it's like what crossroads are you at most of us are in life some life transition what crossroads us if this 5 years of your life is a chapter
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what's the chapter about uh what would you do if you weren't afraid I had a friend who was being interviewed for a job and at the end of the interview he he said to the interviewer what would you do if you weren't afraid and the lady burst out
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crying because she wouldn't be doing HR at that company I asked my students at Yale what would you do if you weren't afraid and every year two or three say well I wouldn't be at Yale it's not the right school for me but I need the
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prestige and so fear governs all our lives to some degree Peter BL who writes about Community has some great questions but you really have to know people to ask these ones what's the no or refusal you keep
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postponing what's the commitment you've made you no longer really believe in what's the gift you hold in Exile what talent do you have that you're not using these are deep questions I once had a
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dinner party and my wife thought I was really pretentious but it worked I asked how do your ancestors show up in your life because we've all been shaped by our ancestors and there was a Dutch family and they talked about their Dutch Heritage there was a black family they
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talked about the African-American experience I've talked about Jewish Heritage and it was a great conversation because we were all we all knew we were affected by our heritages but we didn't really hadn't really pinned it down so we had a great conversation talking
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about that and so these are the easy parts of getting to know somebody under the normal circumstances of life now we happen to live in a time that's not normal and so to have a graduate degree
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level of social connection with other people you've got to be able to make that connection under under favor unfavorable circumstances and so I had a friend um that I mentioned all the mental health
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problems I had a friend named Peter Marx who we were friends since we were 11 uh and Peter uh had this seemingly Charmed Life he had a great wife wonderful kids he was an eye
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surgeon but at age 57 uh he got hit by a very severe recession depression and I thought I was well educated but I didn't know what Depression was really I learned that you can't understand depression by
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extrapolating from your moments of sadness depression is not like that uh as Michael Gerson said depression is a malfunction in the instrument people use to perceive
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reality and so in the case of my friend he had these vicious lying voices in his head saying you're worthless nobody would miss you if you're gone and so I didn't quite understand how
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severe the Despair and the pain really was and so I made social skill mistakes and a lot of this was over coid we were talking by phone and so I in the beginning I tried to give him ideas
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about how we could live make the depression lift and so I said well you know you used to do these service trips to Vietnam why don't you do that again and when you do that I learned all you're doing is showing the depressed
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person you don't get it because because it's not ideas that the depressed person is missing it's energy and a lot of other stuff and then the second mistake I
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made was to say your life is so great you know appreciate what you have around you and basically I was just telling him you should be enjoying the things you're palpably not enjoying and how better to make somebody
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feel even worse and so I think I learned gradually over the time that a friend's job in that circumstance is just to acknowledge how much the situation
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sucks and to remind him you'll be there I'll be there forever I'm not going away from this uh there's no abandonment here uh and I wish I had um sent a more text
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little tck touches just through the day uh no response necessary Victor Frankle in man search for meaning when he would counsel people who were contemplating suicide he said life has not stopped expecting things of
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you and it seems seems harsh to me but he says it it calls people to understand the effect they have on the world and the effect they can have on the world because in times like these people who have been through some suffering have
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the credibility to talk to other people through this Pro their own process of suffering there's a great quote from thoron Wilder without your wound where would your power be it is your very remorse
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that makes your low voice tremble in the hearts of men the very Angels themselves cannot persuade The Wretched and blund ing children on Earth as can one human being broken on the wheel of living in
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love service only wounded soldiers can serve That's The Power of it that a depressed person can have on the world or of someone who's been through this now sadly Peter succumbed to Suicide
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about a year and a half ago and nothing I said there are things I said wrong but nothing I could have said would have made any difference the monster was just bigger than Peter and it was going to be
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bigger than the rest of us and so it was a hard a hard lesson so that's one kind of social skill that unfortunately has become necessary for so many people how to sit through sit with people who are
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going through depression mental health issues grief the second kind of hard conversation that has become unfortunately necessary is conversations across ideological difference across
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class difference across racial difference across any kind of difference and these can sometimes be hard conversations uh often when you're in these conversations there's critique and there's blame especially me I walk into
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a room I I come associated with the New York Times with Yale University I come a pretty establishment Elite credentials and a lot of people on both left and right see me as part of the systems of Oppression that keep them
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down and so there's often criticism and my instinct is to um be defensive oh I'm not the r I'm one of the good guys you don't understand the things I'm dealing with but I've come to
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appreciate that our in this world my job and I think all our jobs when we're being we're talking across difference is to stand in the other person's standpoint it's to ask the other person in three separate ways in three
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different kinds what am I missing here tell me more about your point of view tell me more tell me more tell me more and if you ask them three or four times in different ways you'll be astonished how the third and fourth answer is
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deeper richer and more complicated than the first first answer so you learn a lot but second you show respect you show respect from their point of view and there's a great book called crucial
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conversations and in that book um they say in every conversation respect is like air when it's present nobody notices and when it's absent it's all anybody can think about and in any conversation your
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conversation is happening on two different levels what we're nominally talking about and the under conversation which is the flow of emotion passing between us with every comment I make I'm either making you
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feel safer or less safe I'm either showing you respect or not I'm either showing you my motivations for telling you this or I'm not and so it's to pay attention to that emotional conversation
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underneath and these skills of of from the first gaze to the conversation to hard conversations amid conflict these to me are the essence of moral life sure moral life is big things like reporting
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embezzlement in at a workplace telling the truth at a trial but to me the essence of morality is to be a genius at the close of hand Irish Murdoch the novelist and philosopher said morality
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is something that happens in the minutia of day-to-day encounter and our job normally we see the world through self-serving eyes our job is to get the self out of the way and enter
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reality and to she says cast a j just and loving attention on the people around us and that's how we prove who we are and how we show up in the world uh and so I ask people now tell me
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about times you feel seen uh and some of my favorite ones are just little daily things like there are some big epical moments but people with glowing eyes will tell me about times they really felt seen and so I had a guy
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tell me Well my second my daughter in second grade uh was having struggling in the year in her in class and the teacher one day said to her you know you're really good at thinking before you speak and that took that one comment
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turned the girl's ear around because it took that thing that moment which she thought was social awkwardness her weakness it turned into a strength and as she told me that he told me that story I thought of my own 11th grade teacher Mrs dnap at Radner I'm I
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was making some smartass com in a class which is what I did and she said David you're getting by on glibness stop it and on the one hand I was humiliated she called me me out in front of the whole class on the other hand I thought wow
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she really knows me wow I'm so on her a woman in her 30s told me a story about when she was n when she was 13 she had her first taste of alcohol and got so drunk she was just lying she couldn't move on the front porch of her house and
00:33:16
her dad who was a strict disciplinarian loomed in the doorway and she thought he's going to scream at me all the things that are already in my head I'm bad I'm bad I'm bad instead he just scooped her up R her inside laid her on
00:33:29
the sofa and said there'll be no punishment here you've just had an experience and 25 years later she remembered that moment as the time her dad really got her and knew she didn't
00:33:41
need to be screamed at at that moment and so these are long memories there's a guy named Rabbi Elliot KLA who tells a story about a woman who has a brain injury and so sometimes she'll just fall to the
00:33:53
ground and she told him I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor but what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me and that's empathy it's knowing
00:34:08
not what makes me comfortable what what you need at that moment and when people do that that's also great times of great seeing I'll give you a few examples and these are a little more profound of what great seeing can do
00:34:20
because it's a creative act that changes relationships and in my view changes societies one of them it's just handy to be able to see people well Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 34 something
00:34:32
like that uh met a guy came to his office named Lyndon Johnson who was then a 28-year old congressman and after the meeting FDR says to his Aid Harold iy you know Harold that's the kind of uninhibited
00:34:45
young pro I might might have been as a young man if I hadn't gone to Harvard uh and then FDR continued in the next couple of generations the balance of power in this country is going to shift to the South and West and
00:35:01
that kid Lyndon Johnson could well be our first Southwestern president pretty good some of you probably know the movie Goodwill Hunting and in that movie Matt Damon plays this math genius Robin Williams
00:35:14
plays as therapist and Matt Damon goes through the movie eviscerating people with his wit including Robin Williams character Williams pulls him out to a pond and gives him a version a longer version of the following speech
00:35:27
you're a tough kid I ask you about war you probably throw shakespear at me right once more into the breach dear friends but you've never been where near one you've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him gasp
00:35:39
his last breath I ask you about love you probably quote me a sonnet but you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable known someone who could level you with her eyes I look at you I don't see a intelligent confident man I see a
00:35:53
cocky scared shitless kid you're a genius will no one denies that personally I don't care about all that I can't learn anything from you that I can't read in some book unless you want to talk about you sport who you are then
00:36:06
I'm fascinated but you don't want to do that you're terrified of what you might say and so that little speech comes from great listening in the first place he's
00:36:18
heard the thing the very thing the Matt Damon character is most desperate to hide which is how terrified he is of life and second it's a great critique with care he's saying there are two
00:36:30
kinds of knowledge in the world there's book knowledge and then there's the personal wisdom you acquire by risking things emotionally and having experiences you have book knowledge you
00:36:43
don't have the knowledge that really matters and so he does that with unconditional love and he points the Damon character in the direction he needs to go it's just a beautiful example of
00:36:55
wisdom I read a story a story in a a book called Lost and Found by Katherine Schultz and in that book she describes her father as this cheerful talkative
00:37:07
gregarious guy a guy who had opinions on everything from infield fly rule to whether apple cobbler was better than apple crisp he just sounds like a wonderful guy uh and he aged and as he got old and
00:37:20
sick suddenly he just stopped talking and nobody could figure out why and so the family visited him in the hospital in those final weeks and she writes I had always regarded my family as close
00:37:32
so it was startling to realize how much closer we get how near we drew around his waning flame then one evening at the very end he sat in the room and the family all went around the room and they
00:37:45
all said the things they didn't want to leave unset and Schultz writes my father mute but seemingly alert looked from one face to another as we spoke
00:37:57
his brown eyes shining with tears IID always hated to see him cry and seldom did but for once I was grateful it gave me hope for what may have been the last time in his life and perhaps the most
00:38:10
important he understood if nothing else I knew that everywhere he looked that evening he found himself where he had always been with his family the center of the circle the source and subject of our Abiding Love and so that was a guy
00:38:24
who died well seen and it's just profound for the people to be involved in that kind of experience and if it's great to be seen I can tell you it's also great to be the one who does the
00:38:36
seeing so once about two years ago I was sitting at my house in DC and I was reading a boring book at the dining room table which is what I'm paid to do uh and my wife opens the
00:38:49
front door which you can see from the dining room table uh and she pauses in the doorway and the Summer sun is streaming and behind her and she doesn't really notice I'm there because that's the kind
00:39:01
of Charisma I have um and but her her eyes rest on a um an orchid that we keep on a table by the door and she's just thinking about
00:39:14
something and I have this sensation wash across my mind which is I know her I really know her I know her through and through and if if you had asked me at that moment what I knew about her it
00:39:29
wasn't the personality traits I would describe to a stranger or even what she was thinking it was the es and flow of her music the harmony of her way of being the incandescence of her
00:39:41
personality the moments of fierceness the moments of insecurity it was as if I wasn't seeing her for a brief moment I was seeing out from her and when you really know someone you you see the
00:39:54
world a little from their point of view and if you would asked me what word I was to describe how I was looking at her the only word in the English language I can think of is the word
00:40:07
beholding I was just beholding her which is like just appreciation and it was just a beautiful moment I told an older couple this story recently and they said yeah that's what
00:40:19
we do with our grandkids we just behold and they say you can never really get to know a stranger I think that's wrong I think in examples in my life and in many of the lives of people I've
00:40:32
spoken to there have been moments when that profound Act of seeing another person really does happen and out of that if we live in a dehumanizing age then seeing another human being is the
00:40:45
most practical and aggressively effective way to fight back at dehumanization and we live at a time when people are not seeing each other in this country
00:40:56
and in the Middle East uh and everywhere and it's a brutalizing time to be here and the natural urge is to cower in close in be protective and I understand
00:41:10
that urge but the people I admire at this time are the defiant humanists who say I will not be calloused over I will not put up the barriers I will not declare war on the others I will be
00:41:23
defiant enough to do the essential humanistic Act which is to try to understand your point of view try to acknowledge you as a person worthy of respect and investigation and
00:41:35
curiosity and it's not naive to lead with respect it's not naive to lead with trust it's not naive to lead with curiosity to me it's the most practical and effective things we can do in a time of brutal
00:41:48
dehumanization thank you very much thank you no the depression experience is an isolating experience so just to show up for people is just tremendously powerful thank you Mr Brooks um thank
00:42:08
you for your wonderful presentation I am a relatively young guy that uh watches you every Friday night thank you for helping our demographics thank you can I bring you around to our donors
00:42:23
I'd like to um uh a quick question so um I actually watched your uh interview uh about a
00:42:34
book on PBS that was it last week and u i uh about the eye contact uh thing uh uh the gays I grew up I was born in West Africa
00:42:47
and I grew up in West Africa and culturally uh I came to America immigrated to America about 31 years ago and uh we were raised uh in a different
00:42:58
culture where eye contact was not uh a part of the culture interesting and so when I came to this country uh being a naturally shy person uh it took me a while actually to understand I mean the
00:43:12
importance of that i i gaze and so America being a country with so many uh different people from everywhere I mean when you meet someone uh that uh has his or her G
00:43:26
uh on the on an angle I mean how do we account for that I mean it's taken me a long time to understand it and I I make it uh I I make an effort uh to to establish eye contact nowadays but uh uh
00:43:40
I recognize that uh that there are people that culturally are uncomfortable with that so yeah well first we should cut each other a little slack first for our cultural differences uh and for uh sometime personality difference people
00:43:53
who are on the Spectrum if you look if for them looking into somebody else's eyes is like touching a hot stove there's just so much incoming that they they just don't like they it's too much for them and that's just the way they're wired um but second these cultural
00:44:06
differences um you know uh I have friends who've immigrated here and they said when I first moved here my cheeks hurt because I had to smile so much uh and so I I you know these cult
00:44:21
we have probably a more individualistic Society than a West African society or Asian soci soety we're a pretty individualistic uh group of people um and so these cultural differences need to be accommodated for but one of things
00:44:34
I admire most in people there there's this phrase Social Capital which is how you build Connection in society and there are two versions of it one is bonding and one is bridging and so bonding is with people right around you
00:44:47
probably like you but bridging is the more exciting which is meeting people who are completely unlike you and getting into their heads and seeing how their culture is different and that you
00:45:00
know we evolve to be in bands of 150 people sort of like ourselves and now we live in these wonderfully diverse societies and our social skills are not adequate to the societies we now live in but one of the
00:45:13
joys is having social range uh you know I for example I don't know what country you're from uh Ghana so I had a woman in my class I had for some reason yeah we have a lot of Ganan
00:45:25
students uh I'll tell you two quick stories about Zara who's from Gano uh the first is I was asking the students um what are you what are you GNA what are your goals after graduation and my American student
00:45:38
said I want to be a lawyer I want to be a banker whatever whatever and Zara said well it's not totally up to me my Village was here and they helped me come here so we're all going to talk about it together and it was a more
00:45:51
communal way of approaching and then the second Z Zara story I'll tell you you is I had a kid from a very fancy Prep School named Harvard Westlake which is out in La it's sort of like exitor Andover type school
00:46:03
and he was a total bro and he treated me like a total bro and I kind of liked it he was a wise ass he'd say Brooks stop being a dick your name dropping again and I got a kick out of the kid and
00:46:17
I and about twoth thirds of the way through the class Zara raised her hand and said Professor books we don't appreciate the way Alex is talking to you and so I said oh let's stop the
00:46:29
class how many of you think Zara is right and how many of you think Alex is right and the vote was 24 to1 on Zara's side and so there was some sense of dignity that she thought should we do
00:46:43
and I was very glad at that day to have her into my class yeah yeah so I would say this is a case where it's good to be pushy uh and so that I have a friend and a source in this book
00:47:36
named Nicholas Epley who's a social psychologist at the University of Chicago and he commutes down to school every day and he was on a commuter train and he he knows because he's a social psychologist the thing that makes us
00:47:48
happiest is having conversations with other human beings and but he's looking around the commuter train and everybody's on their screens with headphones in and so he's a social psychologist he
00:48:00
pays people on the subsequent trips $100 each to talk to a stranger and they all report back afterwards with the researchers that this ride talking to a stranger was a
00:48:13
thousand times better than their normal ride just on their screens and his conclusion is we badly underestimate how much people how much will enjoy these conversations we badly underestimate how deep people want to
00:48:25
get uh and so if you can break through it actually pays off and I'm as I said not the jokey the most social guy on Earth and I used to go on the plane with
00:48:37
headphones in even if there was no music so my seatmate wouldn't talk to me but now I talk to people and you know I talked to a guy a couple weeks ago or months ago who was this big Trump supporter he migrated this country from
00:48:49
Russia from at age seven he built up a company selling T-shirts to uh other parts of the world and he made a fortune lost a fortune made a fortune lost a fortune had more marriages than I could count and at the
00:49:02
end of the ship he's showing me his vacation he's an 80y old guy he's surrounded by 20y olds uh on the back of a yacht I don't know where these people came from but so he wasn't my cup of tea but I remember that
00:49:15
conversation and so I I just find if you can break through that barriers people will enjoy it the final story I'll tell is a guy named Dan McAdams who's a a research at Northwestern he studies how
00:49:27
people tell their life stories and so what he does is he brings people in he asks them tell me about your high points your low points your turning points and the interviews take four hours and he
00:49:39
said half the people cry at some point but then at the end he hands them a little check to compensate them for their time and they um they push the check back they say I don't want to take money
00:49:52
for for this this has been the best afternoon I've had in years years because no one has ever asked me the story and as a journalist I can tell you if you approach somebody and say tell me
00:50:04
your story in a respectful way no one ever says None your damn business they're a thrilled to do it now having said that when my wife tells me to put away my phone I get pissed off at her
00:50:15
but but it's probably a good practice um Hello thank you again for all you've shared today and for your optimism and joy and you've made made it clear that that you've made a lot of changes and you're really happy about
00:50:29
those changes and when I told my friends in my book group I was coming you know they were interested and said he sure moved to the left lately now that's where they live they're they're happy about that but my question of you is has
00:50:42
that change in all the changes you've made also been difficult uh good question so the the first first on politics um my heroes are a guy named Edmund Burke who's a class a
00:50:55
conservative of the old school and his key concept is epistemological Modesty that the world is really complicated we should be careful about what we can know and so change should be gradual and incremental and he was my hero at 25
00:51:08
he's my hero today and my other hero is Alexander Hamilton and Hamilton is a Puerto Rican Hip-Hop star from New York um uh but no his his thesis is we should build a society in which poor boys and
00:51:24
girls like him can rise and succeed we should have social Mobility so those are my anchors and I those are still my anchors but in my view the Republican party has shifted so far in a different
00:51:37
direction that it's not conservative to me and on some issues I probably have shifted to the left capitalism does not distribute its what it produces as fairly as it ought
00:51:49
to uh race in America is a National Crime and so you know I've written columns for reparations recently things like that at least within the last five years and so that would be a shift over the left and
00:52:03
I would say once you get out of the team mentality it's wonderfully liberating to be able to think for yourself and it used to be I was on a
00:52:15
team and now I'm on there's a a party in the 19th century called the wig party which had Daniel Webster and Henry Clay and early on Abraham Lincoln and they represent what I think is the best political party the best political
00:52:27
tradition in America and now there are six of us so uh I'm on no team anymore but it's liberating and then as for um the
00:52:39
emotional first of all I haven't lost any friends because the Republicans I was super close to have all become never trumpers and it's weird that the people who have become trumpers were people I didn't like
00:52:51
anyway and I don't say that because I I have a lot of friends who are Trump suppor supps and members of my family who I love so I don't mean to be harshly judgmental but it's just my crew all became never trumpers and then the final
00:53:03
change I would say is um i' I got a lot more emotions going on right now like when I was back at rner I used to think well all these people are suffering but I'm shallow I'm happy with that I'm I'm
00:53:15
I'm good and now I feel um happy like joyously happy sometimes and really sad and pained other times and I think man emotions are very much a mixed blessing
00:53:29
um but it's better to live that way than not there's a novelist who I admire named Fred Frederick bner his dad died when he was nine and he never grieved and then in middle age he said
00:53:43
if you cut yourself off from the pain of life you cut yourself off from the holy sources of life itself and so he opened them up himself up over the course of his adulthood and
00:53:55
by the end he was crying about his dad every day and he said what we want most is to someone to look in our face with full understanding and respect and what we
00:54:06
fear most is somebody to look into our face with full understanding and respect and so he says what you should do is you should tell your secrets from time to time because if you tell your
00:54:18
secrets you will not fall for the false version of yourself you're trying to sell to the world and you'll make it easy easier for the other person to tell a few secrets of their own and so that that's the kind of trajectory and path of openness and
00:54:32
deeper connection that I'm shooting for oh thanks very much David for everything and uh I'm an older guy that likes watching you on Friday night um the uh the basic question is uh when did
00:54:46
you first realize you wanted to write this book and how long did it take you to do it yeah so um I'm on a four-year cycle I come back to the Philadelphia Free Library every four years uh and
00:54:58
I've been on that cycle for since 2000 or so uh and so it just takes me a long time to acquire all the information uh and you have to give yourself to permission to write badly so if you look at the first 200 drafts of
00:55:12
this book they're pretty bad and so that takes me a while and I think when I first uh wanted to write this book uh was how many people told me they felt invisible and
00:55:23
unseen and I was just it came up again and again in interviews and this was black people tell me that white people didn't understand the systemic injustices they face every day it was rural people telling me they didn't feel seen by
00:55:36
Coastal Elites it was Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension uh it was lonely kids who had no one to see them well it was people in broken marriages uh who realized the person who should know them
00:55:48
best had no clue and it just seemed there was so much pain and at about this time I just wanted to get be a deeper version of myself and so I'm partly it's for
00:56:01
hopefully for the society but personal transformation and social transformation happen at the same time and it's how we each show up in the world uh is how we make a
00:56:13
world and so I wanted to be better myself and so a lot of us writers we're just working at our in public uh and and uh my favorite saying about writing is a writer I'm a beggar
00:56:28
who tells other beggar where he found bread so if I read something or hear something that's useful to me I love sharing it uh and so that's the thing that gets me greatest joy is when I learn something I write it down I put it in a
00:56:42
book I talk about it and I see other people writing it down and that's so I'm not so much a writer I'm a teacher I just convey the knowledge that I've heard uh and it's I must say it's been a
00:56:54
horrible four years in many ways but it's been so uplifting to be around people who are just phenomenal good illuminators so thank you very
00:57:05
[Applause] much
End of transcript